Today, I had a chat with one of my colleagues, who joined our company about seven months ago. We are remodeling the space on the twenty-second floor of our building to accommodate additional work space and employees, and so all the employees who used to sit on that floor, primarily on the tech and product team, have been displaced. Some are working from home, while others are scattered all over the twenty-third floor with the rest of us.

It’s funny how we are at work; if we aren’t sitting directly with people, we probably don’t talk to them much at all unless we have work-related things to talk about. Things get busy with all of us during the work day. With this colleague, we got along very well every time we spoke, but given we’ve always been on different floors and did very different work functions, we didn’t have much opportunity to talk. We talked about how she was born in India, raised in Oman because of her parents’ jobs, went to school in Canada, got naturalized and became a citizen there, and is now in New York. It was funny how she told me the first part, though. She said that she was raised in the Middle East, which is where her parents still are. That’s funny, I thought. How come she didn’t tell me which country she was raised in? So I asked her which country, and she said Oman. And I said, oh, I know where that is. She laughed and said pretty much no one she talked to knew where or even what Oman was. A lot of people asked her if Oman was a city in India. She said it was so exhausting that she decided to just tell people she was raised in the Middle East and leave it at that.

Stupid Americans.